‘42nd Street’ at Bass Hall dances into your heart

42nd Street is one of a handful of musicals in which the choreography and dancing overshadows every other artistic element. It could have the world’s best singers and actors, but if the tap dancing is not perfection, it’s all for naught.

Luckily the non-Actor’s Equity tour of the musical, which just spent two weeks in Dallas and opened Tuesday night for a week’s run at Bass Performance Hall on the Broadway at the Bass Series, has the dancing down. And how.

The show was originally a movie musical, released in 1933 with choreography by Busby Berkeley. It was reworked for the stage, with a book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, using much of the film’s original songs with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Al Dubin. That debuted on Broadway in 1980 and run for almost the entire decade, and was revived there in the 2000s. This touring production is directed by Bramble, with musical staging and new choreography by Randy Skinner.

The show opens with the curtain rising only a few yards so that we can see (and hear) the dancing feet of a tap-dancing ensemble rehearsing for the premiere of a musical called Pretty Lady on Broadway in 1933. Then it opens to fully reveal Beowulf Borritt’s sets (gorgeous backdrops), Roger Kirk’s 1930s costumes and the cast fiercely at work, led by rehearsal director Andy (Lamont Lee). The tapping is quick and energetic, and everyone’s appropriately light on their feet.

They stay that way.

This show is one of the great “small-town girl leaves everything to try Broadway and hits it big right away” stories. That’s Peggy Sawyer (Caitlin Ehlinger), who’s a better tapper than anyone. She’ll have a flirty romance with dancer Billy Lawlor (Blake Stadnik, a terrific dancer and actor and the standout in this cast), butt heads with famed director Julian Marsh (Matthew J. Taylor), and soon enough be promoted from chorine to star when she takes over for the injured diva Dorothy Brock (Kaitlin Lawrence).

It’s always been hard to buy Marsh’s quick turnaround from difficult and demanding director to someone in love with Sawyer, but Taylor and Ehlinger’s chemistry works. She might be fresh off the bus, but she’s no rube. Britte Steele has one of the scene-stealing roles as Maggie, and she goes too cartoonishly big several times, but she’s easy to love.

Nothing speaks for this show more than the dancing. All of the big ensemble tap numbers (42nd Street, Dames, Lullaby of Broadway, etc.) are phenomenal. It’s the type of dancing precision — not just with the unison in movement and sound of the taps, but of leg and arm position — that makes you wish dance ensemble numbers in local-level musicals were as tight.

Kudos to music director J. Michael Duff for keeping the 10-member orchestra perfectly pitched with the onstage goings on, too.

This story was originally published July 13, 2016 at 3:33 PM with the headline "‘42nd Street’ at Bass Hall dances into your heart."